Tuesday, April 22, 2008

eBay is ending it's Liveauctions. After a joint venture with Sotheby's, eBay had still been linking clicks to bricks. eBay writes here "Many members may not have beeen aware of Live Auctions – these are differentiated listings linked to physical or virtual auction houses, and moderated by a live auctioneer. Furthermore, these listings are not subject to a specific end time; Live Auctions conclude when there are no further bids."

One of the problems with Live Auctions was that it wasn't seemlessly integrated into eBay as Scott Wingo described: "As a buyer, I always hated when I'd get excited to find something there and then realize it was the @#$@! live auction stuff (little blue paddle gives it away). This was so painful to register and use, I never took the time as a buyer to mess with it. That being said there are some very large jewelry and collectible sellers that sell 10's of millions of dollars by our calculations on the platform."

At verKoopwinkel we are still experimenting with auctioning in the store using the normal eBay online format, but we display the item offline in the store, with paper copies of the eBay listing. Customers who don't have E-mail (about 15 to 25% ! of our customers) can place a bid as "Cashklant" an eBay user id we administer.

It is exciting and customers like it. But it is time consuming and confusing as well, especially when listings end. We try telling customers about eBay sniping, but it is hard to explain. We have already had a few cases of people saying after losing an auction in the last seconds, when bidding in the store, that they had wanted to bid more. Now we have some paintings on eBay, but I am also thinking about another format. Which is to put articles on Marktplaats and let the selling price be determined by bidding. For example, put articles on line during the week and say: "Asking price to be set Saturday morning at 9:00 based on bidding till then."